SSD Revolution

Welcome to the third installment in our ongoing series on the solid state revolution. The last two articles looked at how SSDs work and how mobile devices and operating systems deal with the changes flash brings, but this week, as folks in the good 'ol USA prepare to celebrate our independence day by jumping into our jet fighter planes and shooting down flying saucers—because that's totally what we do, for all you folks not lucky enough to live here—this week we're going to take a bit of a break from the long-form journalism and instead do something a bit more Web-two-point-oh, as they say. This week, we want to hear how SSDs are working for you.

Flash storage is popping up everywhere, in the home and in the enterprise, and the kinds of folks most likely to be regular Ars Technica readers are also the kinds of folks most likely to be using solid state disks extensively. We're interested in hearing you share your experiences with solid state in the comments below. How has flash helped you? It's one thing to say that you bought an SSD and slapped it into your laptop or desktop and it was all fast and stuff, but it's something else entirely to tell the tale of how an SSD in your gaming rig saved your bacon in a deathmatch by keeping your system running smooth. Do SSDs, in fact, make you frag harder?

For my own anecdote, Ars Technica has a thriving Minecraft community; there is a perpetual Minecraft thread in the OpenForum where players collaborate about the game. I administer one of the unofficial community servers, and SSDs factor heavily into my Minecraft hosting. For the server hosting the worlds, Minecraft can be a disk IO-intensive application, and solid state enables me to host a diverse map with lots of people busily building projects with a minimum of lagging, and on relatively modest hardware that runs quiet and cool on the floor of my closet. Without an SSD, to get anywhere near the same level of responsiveness I'd have to use a very fast spinning disk, something like a Western Digital VelociRaptor, which would generate considerably more noise and heat.

SSDs of course aren't just for gaming—clever uses of SSDs at work abound, too. Everyone knows that replacing laptop drives with SSDs can make laptops faster across the board, but the added performance and productivity improvements can translate directly into lowered support costs and real money saved: imagine, for example, how an organization's IT support metrics would be altered if the help desk had to field 50 percent fewer calls about a user's computer being "slow." That might be enough to get a CIO to sit up and take notice.

Another example: corporate virus scanners are notorious performance-sapping resource hogs. It's long been a sad joke that the challenge for an IT security organization isn't necessarily picking the best antivirus suite, but rather picking the one that is the least bad. Full disk virus scans, on-access scans, e-mail attachment scans—often, policy mandates so many scans that users will do everything they can to circumvent or disable the antivirus tool just to get some work done. This leads to security breaches and spyware and malware outbreaks on unprotected equipment, and it happens because no one wants to sit and watch a "Please wait" spinner when they're trying to pull a proposal together while facing a deadline.

SSDs can fix this. Sometimes the antivirus suite is dictated by policy outside of anyone's control, coupled with an onerous scanning schedule, but mandating solid state disks across a network can drastically reduce the pain of compliance by removing the bottleneck. Rather than staring at a wait cursor and listening to the hard drive's unending chattering when a scan kicks off, even an inexpensive SSD can provide enough throughput to let the user continue working while the antivirus application does its thing. With the potential cost of cleaning up a data breach running in the tens of millions of dollars, including restitution costs to customers whose private data might have been exposed, the relatively tiny cost of including an SSD in your standard configuration begins to look like a very good deal indeed.

The high bandwidth and low latency of SSDs guarantee them a place in the data center, too. The most obvious fit, as mentioned in our original installment, is for hosting high-transaction databases; in fact, merely moving a database onto SSD can (not will, but can) provide enough of an improvement in database performance that you can forego expensive and time-consuming tuning operations. Time is often more valuable than money, and if your choices are to spend weeks with a consultant carefully tweaking your database system's parameters or just buy some SSDs and migrate, you might do well to recall the old muscle car adage: "There's no replacement for displacement."

Taking things a step further, solid state in the data center doesn't have to be shaped like a disk at all. We touched in the first feature on high-speed random access storage by companies like Fusion-io and Texas Memory Systems; there are lots of other vendors producing ultra-fast systems based on flash, including Tintri, a company which makes MLC SSD-filled appliances designed and tuned specifically for hosting virtual machines. For some organizations, buying purpose-built SSD appliances rather than using general server and SAN space for virtual machine hosting can be a powerful cost-saver.

So, speak up. Home, work, data center, or otherwise, where and how do Ars readers use SSDs? We want to hear what you have to say, and we'll be promoting up the best comments into the feature area just below the story.

Promoted Comments

The most significant speed boost, I had on my development machines, which usually have to run two or more virtual machines. Concurrent access to the hard drives would bring it to its knees very very fast.

Now with SSDs inside, I can work comfortably from my old MacBook (Aluminum/2008).

Recently while doing some load testing which required me to launch literally hundreds of flash player instances (don't ask) - I noticed that on my machine with an SSD, I was not memory limited at all. Once I passed a certain threshold of flash player instances on non-SSD machines, most of the physical memory was allocated and the machine started swapping incessantly, making it almost unusable.

But on the SSD machine, I hit 99% memory utilization and was able to keep on launching new flash player instances with little noticeable performance degradation. I am sure it was swapping like crazy, but it was swapping to SSD. Effectively the SSD was fast enough that it mimicked RAM, at least for this particular test case.

An SSD, for a home user, almost turns the PC into an appliance. Click the power on button, and you're at your desktop in 10-28 seconds. Click the power button again and the PC is off in 10 seconds. If you click the button as you sit down, it's basically up at the same time you're ready to use it.

I like this. its very true.

I replaced the 5400rpm 80GB laptop platter drive in an old Dell XPS m1210 (core 2 duo 2.0 GHZ) with a then SATA1 Samsung SSD 64gb's. Boot times changed from an "i don't want to use this junk, 10 minutes to boot, and its still doing something in the background when i get to the desktop so i need to wait another 2 to 5 minutes" to an unbelievable "hey honey turn on the laptop and find us a netflix film to watch..... oh its on already and you're at netflix before i finished asking you?" On older laptops, the platter disks seem not to be that durable, and the speeds gains alone give an aging laptop another 1 to 2 year shelf life.

Professionally, we did exactly as the article suggested, replaced all Laptop hard drives with SSD's. users quit complaining of slowness. And in one particular department that was a heavy Excel/Access usage department, we replaced all the laptop hard drives proactively, and they went from copying-pasting 50,000 lines by a few dozen columns taking 10 minutes to a few seconds (like a normal copy paste function should be), it really saved our butts cuz IT was being called daily for "slowness" by this one department.

At work we upgraded to some nice INTEL SSD's. We were doing some heavy DB and ETL(Extract Transform Load) data manipulation and development. It has been an absolute win with the ETL suite dropping from 2-3 hours run time to 35 mins. After some optimizing it now takes twenty minutes.

SSDs consume just as much, if not more, power as compared to spinning platters.

While it's not a major difference relatively speaking, this is not true. While a performance platter and SSDs may have similar power usage for scenarios involving constant write, SSDs tend to use significantly less in all other scenarios. The Scorpio Black 500 is a good example of a performance 2.5" platter drive. It draws around 3.48W for sequential write, 3.17 for sequential read, 2.57 for 4K random read, and 0.99 on idle (3.96 on startup). The Seagate Momentus 750 is similar (3.51, 3.02, 2.62, 0.86, 3.99). If you're willing to take a major performance hit, even vs other platters, it's possible to get the numbers down somewhat with something like the Scorpio Blue (2.93, 2.45, 1.64, 0.72, 2.94) but it's not huge and that goes even further down the road of the drive having to be spun up much longer to do the same amount of work, because in all cases the faster you can get to idle the better the power consumption.

SSDs, in contrast, all tend to be much better on many, if not all, measures.Samsung 830: 3.47, 1.77, 1.02, 0.31, 2.32Crucial m4: 2.93, 1.55, 0.84, 0.60

And "the race to sleep" deserves extra emphasis in any discussion of mobile life. No matter what the tech, be it memory, CPU, or storage, it all consumes far more power when active then when idle. The faster a system can turn on, finish, and go back to sleep, the better the battery. Thus speed itself can be a power advantage. The Samsung 830 is going to spend a LOT more time idling at 0.31 watts then any platter drive.

Lee Hutchinson
Lee is the Senior Technology Editor at Ars and oversees gadget, automotive, IT, and culture content. He also knows stuff about enterprise storage, security, and manned space flight. Lee is based in Houston, TX. Emaillee.hutchinson@arstechnica.com

I do not have, and have not dealt with any SSD-equipped machines. Maybe I have, and didn't bother to check.

But now that SSD prices are reaching the <$1/GB point, I think the uptake will increase even more in the consumer laptop space, whether as an upgrade, or replacement. I for one, will be getting one of those nifty MultiBay (Multi-Pass, anyone?) hard drive caddies, and sticking an SSD in as boot drive, while my spinning platter drive serves as large storage!

But on an older maching (HP Compaq 6910p), is it worth it, I wonder? Being that it's a measly C2D T7xxx CPU and maxed out on RAM (4GB), I dunno. I also don't know if an upgrade to a T9500 (max supported Socket P) C2D will help out, either. Probably, in conjunction with an SSD, it will feel much more 'modern'?

I've a couple of old work laptops that I keep around the house to surf the net (mail/weather/recipes, and such). While I'd like to see the speed difference in installing a SSD, I'm currently too cheep to shell out the cash at the moment. Given the low overhead web browsing has on the system I'm inclined to wait a bit until prices come down. Or a harddrive crashes, that might justify it.

Side note: Anyone throw a SSD in an IBM X61? I have a couple of those laying around and thought it might be pretty speedy with Ubuntu as an OS.

Another example: corporate virus scanners are notorious performance-sapping resource hogs. It's long been a sad joke that the challenge for an IT security organization isn't necessarily picking the best antivirus suite, but rather picking the one that is the least bad.

Oh god, you just reminded me of my last company where they set up the anti-virus to do a full scan at 1pm every single day. It brought every single persons HP laptop to a barely usable crawl for about 35 minutes.

On the upside, I got a guaranteed 35 minutes lunch break (a rarity!) every day for about three months before common sense prevailed.

I've a couple of old work laptops that I keep around the house to surf the net (mail/weather/recipes, and such). While I'd like to see the speed difference in installing a SSD, I'm currently too cheep to shell out the cash at the moment. Given the low overhead web browsing has on the system I'm inclined to wait a bit until prices come down. Or a harddrive crashes, that might justify it.

Side note: Anyone throw a SSD in an IBM X61? I have a couple of those laying around and thought it might be pretty speedy with Ubuntu as an OS.

This article title is absolutely incorrect. I thought you were going to give real configuration advice that was solidly backed by facts rather than all the weird things suggested for Windows 7 nowadays (turn off this or that etc). What I got was a fluff piece with no advice on how to make most of an SSD in Windows, OS X, and Linux.

The most significant speed boost, I had on my development machines, which usually have to run two or more virtual machines. Concurrent access to the hard drives would bring it to its knees very very fast.

Now with SSDs inside, I can work comfortably from my old MacBook (Aluminum/2008).

This article title is absolutely incorrect. I thought you were going to give real configuration advice that was solidly backed by facts rather than all the weird things suggested for Windows 7 nowadays (turn off this or that etc). What I got was a fluff piece with no advice on how to make most of an SSD in Windows, OS X, and Linux.

What was the point of this article???

I admit I was hoping from the headline that the article would be about how to make the most from my SSD.

Well, now that relatively large SSD prices are well below the $1 per 1Gb level I have been able to avoid replacing my 2008 Mac Pro (a real bonus since the 2012 Mac Pros seem to offer relatively little new).

The machine was feeling pretty sluggish, but a 512Gb M4 from Crucial has transformed it into a bit of a monster. Symlinks to photos, movies and iTunes keep the big data on my old HD, and 512Gb is more than enough for my work files. Opening big apps like InDesign is insanely quick, FCP Pro X doesn't beach all at all, and even Safari pages are far more responsive.

An SSD, for a home user, almost turns the PC into an appliance. Click the power on button, and you're at your desktop in 10-28 seconds. Click the power button again and the PC is off in 10 seconds. If you click the button as you sit down, it's basically up at the same time you're ready to use it.

Samsung 860 (64GB) in a Core i5 PC with 4GB of Memory. Primary use is gaming, but I've done two semesters worth of college work on it as well (running MySQL and Apache for that purpose.)

Windows 7 boots before the colored dots of the "Starting Windows" logo begin to spin around each other. I play an MMORPG on it (CIty of Heroes), and the load times between zones are within 5 seconds (took 30-45 seconds on my old PC using SATA 1.5GB 7200RPM hard drives.) I run Samsung's TRIM utility about once a month and keep at least 20GB free at all times to keep Windows 7 snappy. (I use a slower, higher capacity Hard Disk on the same PC to store media and the majority of programs, like Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite, which doesn't require speed to work well.)

I'm staring at my Mushkin Callisto Deluxe because it died out of the blue after fewer than 9 months of use. I didn't use it for gaming or development...primarily netflix and web. Hesitant on getting another SSD.

From a gaming perspective, SSDs have really added some benefit to upgrades in graphics as well. League of Legends, a popular F2P game, and I have had a nasty love-hate relationship since I began playing in early 2011. I have a decently powerful Dell XPS, and at the time a standard HDD. As the game has received updates in graphics and such, my laptop had increasing problems running the game at its full potential. However, around Christmas time 2011, I caved and bought a SSD and slapped it in. While I didn't immediately notice any significant performance increases, during my games I was experiencing much better performance (i.e. a consistently higher FPS count). This is an often-overlooked way of improving your gaming experience, especially for local games.

I just received an upgraded work laptop with a Wildfire 128GB SSD. Using it as an OS disk, and for FEA simulation cache space. The FEA program i use is highly IO intensive, so this means my computer still functions instead of slowing to an unusable crawl. I've also found that Win7 backup works without a similar craaaaawwwwwwlllll effect now as well. bonus.

I had also hoped this article would be a bit more practical. For instance, i've heard different opinions on configuring Win7 to use SSDs correctly.

Regarding VMs, I have an SSD for my main OS, and then run VMs off of spinning disks. Given that VMs are a smaller part of my development workflow (development on Mac, does it work on Win7? XP?), it doesn't bother me that its a little bit slower to do work.

I just upgraded my 128GB Intel 520 SSD to a Samsung 256GB 830 SSD. The extra space is very nice, and its a bit faster (OS boot in 11s instead of 15s). Plus it was cheap! I paid $190 for a 256GB SSD at Newegg last week. The old SSD will get thrown into a new Mac Mini whenever Apple decides to ship those.

Recently while doing some load testing which required me to launch literally hundreds of flash player instances (don't ask) - I noticed that on my machine with an SSD, I was not memory limited at all. Once I passed a certain threshold of flash player instances on non-SSD machines, most of the physical memory was allocated and the machine started swapping incessantly, making it almost unusable.

But on the SSD machine, I hit 99% memory utilization and was able to keep on launching new flash player instances with little noticeable performance degradation. I am sure it was swapping like crazy, but it was swapping to SSD. Effectively the SSD was fast enough that it mimicked RAM, at least for this particular test case.

Regarding VMs, I have an SSD for my main OS, and then run VMs off of spinning disks. Given that VMs are a smaller part of my development workflow (development on Mac, does it work on Win7? XP?), it doesn't bother me that its a little bit slower to do work.

The big benefit doesn't necessarily come from putting your VMs on the SSD, but from isolating your VM traffic from everything else.

At my work, the sales people got SSDs (and they usually run only one or a few applications at a time), while developers, tech support, secretaries, receptionists (all under the non-sales umbrella, no matter what your computer needs are) got 5400 rpms.

I created for myself a powershell script that stops my backup client service at business hours and re-run it during night. I also stopped most non-essential Windows services and we are all leaving our machines running 24 hours a day.

I also got a fast SD card there and I use ready boost. It helps a lot with 3GB of RAM on a 32bit machine.

The bloody backup client has no intelligence to detect that you are busy and, to offend more, it pops up a confirmation "backup done" that can't be disabled and always interrupts your typing.

(Iron Mountain Connected Backup I HATE YOU)

Even sleeping it means one of the dozens of background services won't do its job during the day and they will all run it as soon as you fire up your laptop and need to work fast. Takes 10 minutes to be able to use the computer.

This article doesn't seem to have much substance, other than "SSDs are faster doing things than spinning disk hard drives."

This might be news to many on the internet, but doubtful it'll be beneficial to Ars readers.

foofoo22 wrote:

This article title is absolutely incorrect. I thought you were going to give real configuration advice that was solidly backed by facts rather than all the weird things suggested for Windows 7 nowadays (turn off this or that etc). What I got was a fluff piece with no advice on how to make most of an SSD in Windows, OS X, and Linux.

What was the point of this article???

Agreed. This is stupid, contentless fluff. Please don't dilute the Ars front page with junk like this. A round up guide on actually making the most of an SSD in a technical way really could be useful to many people, even on Ars. Taking OS X alone for example, I bet plenty of people don't know about turning off atime, moving home folders, TRIM hacks, etc. A thorough analysis on what sort of impact different block/stripe sizes might have might also be of use. An actual technical article in other words, with sections for each major OS.

Over the last year or so, I have converted all of the "workstation" PCs in my home over to SSDs. My server still uses spinning disks, but that is because I need terabytes of space, something not available in SSD (in an affordable way) yet. I have seen a huge uptick in performance on my desktop, giving it near instant-on performance as well as "on-click" application loading with Windows 7. This is something I expected.

However, one of my more interesting uses is in my Media Center PCs. I have a SandyBridge i3 in one and an AMD E-Series APU in the other. Adding SSDs to these machines gave me near instant-on as well as silent performance from these machines, adding great value to them as MCPCs. I'll never buy another spinning disk for a workstation again.

IMO, SSDs are the single buggest performance improvement in recent computing tech advances. It's like going from dial up to broadband a decade ago. And just like internet speeds, once you get a taste of the speed improvements, you can't go back.

I came to read this article in hopes of getting tips and tweaks to get the most out of my SSD drive. tom's Hardware has a good guide, which i use on my recently-built gaming rig and have not had any issues so far.

Re. corporate laptops we were recently (as in the past few months) quoted $500 to add ~120GB SSDs to our standard corporate laptop builds. How that makes any sense, I don't know.

Assuming it's not just a flat-out ripoff with "installation fees" or similar, they might be trying to soak you by offering SLC high intensity server SSDs as some "corporate class" feature. SLC drives really are far more expensive then the MLC virtually all drives use now, but they can be of value in some applications. However those applications definitely do not include a random laptop, no matter who is using it.

I've had no good reason to buy a SSD so far. No concurrent applications running on some server. Any SSD would be smaller than the drive I currently have, and a second drive wouldn't quite fit into the laptop I'm using. And somewhere along the way I lost track of the actual number of times a SSD can overwrite the same memory location before that location stops working: did that become a non-issue? I mean, some folks like me still have 2001 Compaq desktops in use because they run XP nicely and don't cost me any extra money. If SSDs can last 10 years and not get flaky, I'll consider one down the road...

Agreed. This is stupid, contentless fluff. Please don't dilute the Ars front page with junk like this. A round up guide on actually making the most of an SSD in a technical way really could be useful to many people, even on Ars. Taking OS X alone for example, I bet plenty of people don't know about turning off atime, moving home folders, TRIM hacks, etc.

or, most of us use an OS which is intelligent enough to disable the things useless or detrimental to SSDs, as well as offer a facility to seamlessly "move" home folders.

First off, RUGGEDNESS. If I gave my six-year-old daughter a netbook with traditional rotating media, I'm pretty sure it would be junk by now. Whereas my daughter's netbook with an SSD survives being dropped off the arm of a sofa in precisely the same way that my wife's laptop with a HD did not (yeah, I made her sit through the re-install after I replaced the hard drive. Woman, *learn*. Also, missus, we have a domestic RAID1 NAS for a reason, don't moan at me if you lose your MP3 collection).

Second, BATTERY LIFE. Yeah, I know, with judicious use of hard disk energy saving features, I might be able to extend the battery life using a traditional rotating hard drive, to something maybe approaching similar to an SSD. But really, who wants a 3-second lag as the hard disk spins up after a minute of inactivity? When I take a PC to a conference, I take a netbook with an SSD, not a laptop with a HD. My aging Eee 901 with 20GB SSD can still eek out 6-8 hours heavy use several years down the line.

Speed? Yeah, I suppose. But the SSD is fitted to an Atom netbook, it wasn't ever going to be fast. Plus, Ubuntu boots pretty quickly anyway, as far as I can tell. Maybe if I used MS-Windows it would matter more.

Grandfather donated his old MSI Wind to the kids the other day, that'll save some fighting over eldest daughter's netbook. First job, rip out the 80GB rotating hard drive and drop in a cheapo 32GB SSD. Then it's Ubuntu + GCompris + Dosbox/Playstation emulator + Xbox controller and job done.

There's some good advice there, but one of the things that article recommends is outright disabling the Windows page file, which is not and never will be a good idea under any circumstances. The topic comes up in the OpenForum often (for example, here and here). Without going too far afield, writes to the page file are usually big coalesced writes rather than tons of tiny scattered random writes, so there's little impact on SSD longevity; further, removing the page file second-guesses the Windows memory management subsystem and leaves you with stuff in RAM that doesn't need to be in RAM, at the expense of stuff that DOES need to be in RAM.

You could also run out of unallocated RAM, like in the bad old days, and bring down the operating system.

Agreed. This is stupid, contentless fluff. Please don't dilute the Ars front page with junk like this. A round up guide on actually making the most of an SSD in a technical way really could be useful to many people, even on Ars. Taking OS X alone for example, I bet plenty of people don't know about turning off atime, moving home folders, TRIM hacks, etc.

or, most of us use an OS which is intelligent enough to disable the things useless or detrimental to SSDs, as well as offer a facility to seamlessly "move" home folders.

Meaning, Windows 7.

Seamlessly moving home?

Sounds like something Unix was able to do when this would have been an MS-DOS vs. System 6 discussion.

I'm currently in the process of building a new rig for my minecraft server, and I am heavily considering getting a SSD for it. The only problem is that my hosting OS (Debian) supposedly has problems with SSD's and trim support along w/ other things. The workaround for it is supposed to be to upgrade the kernel to 3.2 (I think) via backports. Of course I'm also wary of the fact that all SSD's are still unstable all around (and more so on Linux).

Personally I didn't really notice the speed boost with SSD until I went back to a spinning disk comp. With SSD my comp never takes a break to fiddle with the page file while I wait for some app to get back into focus, and the apps starts faster though.

Non Samsung disk (WD, Seagate at least) also made distracting clicking noises when they went into sleep mode, and sometimes made the entire computer freeze while they did that. Bloody annoying.

It's not just anti-virus that can slow an enterprise desktop. I'm a Mac/Unix guy in our IT department, not one of the Windows guys, so I don't know the exact details, but our desktop PCs are horribly slow to boot. Win XP on modern hardware should fly, rather than taking multiple minutes between pushing the power button and being able to work. About a year ago we finally started getting our PCs with SSDs instead of HDs, and wow what a difference. The new systems actually feel "normal" to my "I have a gaming PC at home" sensibilities.

Well, normal until I put an SSD with Win 7 in my gaming PC at home, anyway.

My first SSD was a 128 GB unit from G.Skill, bought during the Vista years. I discovered the "stuttering" problem found in drives that didn't have TRIM or onboard garbage collection (quite a number of them during that timeframe). So that unit came out and I bought a first-gen 128GB Patriot TorqX drive, which did have TRIM, and it was awesome, especially under Win7.

I still use that old G.Skill drive by the way - it had a USB connector built-in, so it's now basically a big huge thumb drive that houses my various software installation media.

The TorqX drive had a 10 year warranty, and a good thing too. It died after about 2.5 years. Suddenly and catastrophically! About halfway through the day it just ... stopped ... working. No recovery operations worked. So I RMA'd it to Patriot, who replaced it with a (then) current-gen TorqX2. The TorqX2 has been running well ever since.

But this raises a point that I feel cannot be emphasized strongly enough: you must regularly backup all data kept on an SSD, unless you're prepared to lose that data at any moment. Because while standard 'spinning rust' hard drives often give advance notice of impending failure, SSDs do not. They just kick the bucket between one IO operation and the next. I was well prepared when my TorqX died, and only lost a half-day's work. I am aware of people who were not so well prepared, and lost a lot of important data!

There's a lot of anecdotal "evidence" floating around about how reliable SSDs are, or are not. I tend to be in the camp which thinks they are as reliable as spinning rust hard drives, but I stand ready to revise my opinion if/when more objective and rigorous data is made available. But either way, there are really only two kinds of storage devices: those that have failed, and those that will fail. SSDs, no matter how reliable, have the unfortunate characteristic of failing suddenly and without warning.

I have a desktop with an i7 990x and video cards in sli and all that fun stuff. I upgraded from velociraptors in raid 0 to a Sandisk Extreme SSD 480 gb and the performance difference was startling to say the least. Programs like Eclipse and Intellij start up so much quicker than before. I don't get to hear the noisy hard drives anymore. Less heat inside my desktop tower as well cause those Velociraptors ran quite hot. Don't have to bother with defragging or raid bios checks. It's just a win all around. Also games load up very very quick too. Witcher 2 levels loaded up so much faster than before...a lot of the in game jerkiness when textures get streamed or what not don't happen anymore. Now the weakest link in my PC are the 285 gtx video cards. Really loving my SSD experience.

This story, while well written was not as exciting as one would have expected. There are a many uses for SSD beyond servers, spinning disk cache being the best example I can think of. I think the author might have touched on the relative short write-life that SSD's have and I am still curious as to just how long they last in comparison to spinning disks. I won't even mention the cost, but hard drives used to be extremely expensive for limited space also.

An SSD, for a home user, almost turns the PC into an appliance. Click the power on button, and you're at your desktop in 10-28 seconds. Click the power button again and the PC is off in 10 seconds. If you click the button as you sit down, it's basically up at the same time you're ready to use it.

I like this. its very true.

I replaced the 5400rpm 80GB laptop platter drive in an old Dell XPS m1210 (core 2 duo 2.0 GHZ) with a then SATA1 Samsung SSD 64gb's. Boot times changed from an "i don't want to use this junk, 10 minutes to boot, and its still doing something in the background when i get to the desktop so i need to wait another 2 to 5 minutes" to an unbelievable "hey honey turn on the laptop and find us a netflix film to watch..... oh its on already and you're at netflix before i finished asking you?" On older laptops, the platter disks seem not to be that durable, and the speeds gains alone give an aging laptop another 1 to 2 year shelf life.

Professionally, we did exactly as the article suggested, replaced all Laptop hard drives with SSD's. users quit complaining of slowness. And in one particular department that was a heavy Excel/Access usage department, we replaced all the laptop hard drives proactively, and they went from copying-pasting 50,000 lines by a few dozen columns taking 10 minutes to a few seconds (like a normal copy paste function should be), it really saved our butts cuz IT was being called daily for "slowness" by this one department.